Terry Eagleton, the British literary theorist, and probably the best known living exponent of Marxist interpretations, is now 68 and seems to have entered a period of reassessment. He is by no means abandoning his stance as an adherent to the political left, but judging by the interview with him by Alexander Barker and Alex Niven in the current issue of the Oxonian Review, he has considerable misgivings about where the turn toward theory in literary studies has landed us:

I fear that literary criticism, at least as I knew it and was taught it, is almost as dead on its feet as clog dancing. That is to say, all of the things that I would have been taught at Cambridge—close analysis of language, responsiveness to literary form, a sense of moral seriousness—all of which could have negative corollaries… I just don’t see that any more. Somewhere along the line that sensitivity to…

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